Smart Villages

Smart digital transformation of villages in the Alpine Space

SmartVillages aimed at facilitating the smart transformation of mountain and rural areas in 6 countries of the Alps (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland), facing the challenge of countering depopulation in marginal and sparsely populated areas.

Poliedra was the leader of the work package “Regional analysis of readiness and needs for a Smart Transition in the Test Areas”, covering the first year of the project and focusing on creating the methodological framework for the work of the project’s Test Areas and the animation of regional stakeholder groups. The project also saw the proposition of policy recommendations to encourage the smart transition of rural and mountain areas.

The project has been one of the most appreciated projects of the entire 2014-2020 Alpine Space programming period: in this sense, it was included among the ‘Lighthouse Projects’ of the Italian Agency for Territorial Cohesion (see here) and its policies recommendations have been cited and disseminated both at the level of the macro-regional strategy of the Alps (EUSALP, here), becoming one of its cross-sectoral strategies, and at the level of the European Commission (see here). Specifically, SmartVillages was appreciated for the innovativeness of the approach (creation of a shared definition of smartness and proposal of a methodology for quantifying it), for the concreteness of the pilot actions and for the important dissemination work at national level and international, which has led to a replication of its activities and to the submission, and subsequent approval, of a new capitalization project, SmartCommUnity, financed by the Alpine Space program in the first call of the 2021-2027 programming.

Funding programme: Interreg Alpine Space

Period: 2018 – 2021

Web-site: www.alpine-space.eu/projects/smartvillages/

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